Some HP servers experience a situation where the PCC (Processor Clocking Control or Collaborative Power Control) communication between the VMware ESXi kernel (VMkernel) and the server BIOS does not function correctly.
As a result, one or more PCPUs may remain in SMM (System Management Mode) for many seconds. When the VMkernel notices a PCPU is not available for an extended period of time, a purple diagnostic screen occurs.
This issue has been resolved as of ESXi 5.0 Update 2 as PCC is disabled by default. For more information, see
VMware ESXi 5.0, Patch ESXi500-Update02: VMware ESXi 5.0 Complete Update 2 (2033751) and the
ESXi 5.0 Update 2 Release Notes.
To work around this issue in versions prior to ESXi 5.0 U2, disable PCC manually.
To disable PCC:
- Connect to the ESXi host using the vSphere Client.
- Click the Configuration tab.
- In the Software menu, click Advanced Settings.
- Select vmkernel.
- Deselect the vmkernel.boot.usePCC option.
- Restart the host for the change to take effect.
For more information, see
Configuring advanced options for ESXi/ESX (1038578).
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For more information, see the HP Customer Advisory article
c03543898.
Note: This is a specific case of a Failed to ack TLB invalidate based purple diagnostic screen. For more information about general cases:
If looking at the logs and searching the Knowledge Base does not reveal any additional error messages that would justify the outage, or if the error has not been documented within the Knowledge Base, collect diagnostic information from the VMware ESXi host and submit a Support Request.
For more information, see:
For more information, see ESXi hosts that use HP CRU driver fail with a purple diagnostic screen when ECC events occur (2001207).